Advocacy campaigns against the "warehousing" of refugees
in camps suggest the facilitation of local integration as a preferred
policy option for states, international organizations, and
non-governmental organizations. This paper argues that the institutions,
assumptions, and habits that the international refugee protection system
has developed over the past forty years hinder our understanding of
local integration as a fundamentally political and refugee- and
host-driven process. The paper uses African case studies to show how
local integration is part of broader processes of local politics. It
proposes alternatives to three key assumptions of conventional
policy-oriented approaches to local integration: (1) that local
integration is a form of local politics rather than institutionalizable
process for an exceptional category of people (e.g., refugees); (2) that
local integration is negotiated by refugees based on a range of
legitimacy claims and forms of exchange rather than primarily based on
"refugee rights"-related claims; and (3) that local
integration is enabled by hosts for a variety of reasons rather than
mainly for reasons related to the idea of "refugee
protection."

The "local integration" of refugees is usually conceived
of as a policy option: something which professional institutions could
and should plan and implement as a response to displacement. From the
perspective of these institutions, such as United Nations agencies,
governments, and nongovernmental organizations, this conception is
understandable, given that they are debating their own programming
options and impacts. However, this paper argues that a policy-oriented
approach significantly limits the possibility of understanding the
process of local integration and the contexts which facilitate or hinder
it. I follow Oliver Bakewell in arguing that academics must move beyond
the assumptions and categorizations of policy-oriented thinking and
bring the interaction between refugees and others "back into
history" (1) by applying "broader social scientific theories
of social [and political] transformation and human mobility" rather
than "privileging their position as forced migrants as the primary
explanatory factor" for protection outcomes. (2)

This paper starts by outlining several key assumptions which the
"refugee protection industry" has adopted about itself and
about refugees in the past forty years which predispose institutions
against local integration. It then discusses a prominent advocacy
campaign which critiques some of these assumptions: namely the
"anti-warehousing" campaign which promotes local integration
as an alternative policy solution to the encampment of refugees. While
this campaign against camps is valuable within the policy field. I argue
that in critiquing camps and advocating for integration its policy focus
nonetheless maintains three related conceptual blinkers. Firstly, it
implies that local integration is an institutionalizable process for an
exceptional category of people (e.g., refugees); secondly, that refugees
integrate through claiming "refugee rights"; and thirdly, that
hosts enable integration with the aim of providing "refugee
protection."

In contrast, this paper uses predominantly rural African case
studies to show how local integration is in practice part of broader
processes of local politics. By local politics I mean a process through
which individuals and groups negotiate with local power holders for
access to needed resources. This approach places refugees and hosts at
the centre of the process, rather than professional refugee protection
institutions, and assumes that refugees are political actors, using
political strategies and tactics just like other individuals and groups.
This argument is based on an analysis which includes recognizing a range
of legitimacy claims used locally by refugees, apart from "refugee
rights," and a variety of reasons why hosts allow and enable
integration, apart from reasons relating to "refugee
protection."

The paper ends by returning to the policy field and assessing
potential policy-based critiques of such an empirical and political
understanding of local integration. It concludes that as local
integration is largely a process which happens without or in spite of
currently dominant institutional interventions, future interventions
which wish to support rather than undermine local integration must first
have the conceptual tools for understanding its locally specific logics.

Framing Local Integration

Before outlining the policy debate about local integration as an
alternative to refugee encampment, let me clarify my understanding of
local integration. The term has been used in many, often conflicting,
ways. (3) I am not referring to the various types of purportedly
self-sufficient refugee settlements, where refugees are largely isolated
from local populations by host governments and international actors. (4)
Even though these settlements may reduce some of the worst economic
dependency problems of fully-catered camps, as it were, they do not
change the essential separateness of refugees and therefore their
removal from local political life.

Some authors define "local integration" in terms of a
final state of similarity to (although not necessarily of assimilation
with) local populations. Jacobsen, for example, describes what she calls
de facto integration as "where the lived, everyday experience of
refugees is that of being part of the local community." This
includes lack of physical danger; freedom of movement in the host
country and freedom to return to the home country; access to sustainable
livelihoods; access to government services like education, health, and
housing; social inclusion through intermarriage and social interactions
with the host community; and comparable standards of living in
comparison with the host community. (5) Jacobsen also emphasizes the
importance of formal legal status, ideally permanent residence or
citizenship in the host country, as the final step to full integration,
since without it de facto integrated refugees remain vulnerable. (6)
Crisp defines local integration primarily as reflecting the
"assumption that refugees will remain indefinitely in their country
of asylum and find a solution to their plight in that state," (7)
in contrast to the assumption of temporariness inherent in camps and
repatriation programs.

Jacobsen's description of "being integrated" is
valuable, as is Crisp's focus on "indefiniteness,"
especially since both include the understanding that integration need
not preclude eventual repatriation or cross-border livelihoods and
identities. However, these authors retain many of the assumptions about
the refugee protection system which I analyze below--such as the primacy
of international and national law, and the "refugee" label--by
underemphasizing the social and political process of integration and the
local actors involved (not only "refugee protection"
professionals). I believe that a very broad, process-focused definition
of integration is necessary in order to overcome many of the
thought-blinkers "refugee-studies" academics have developed. I
define local integration as a process of negotiating access to local
legitimacy and entitlement on the basis of a variety of value systems
determined by local power holders in dialogue with refugees. Such a
broad analysis of negotiation strategies, local value systems and local
actors is necessary to develop a subtle, rather than a blueprint, debate
on integration. I will return to this below.

There is an extensive literature on the integration of refugees in
northern countries, focusing on the interaction between the
individual/small group and the host state/society around issues of
cultural assimilation, economic access, etc. (8) There are fewer studies
on refugee integration in the context of "mass" movements in
the "South," but it is definitely a phenomenon that occurs
more often than is academically observed. (9) The examples of local
integration I will discuss are all African and mainly rural or
small-town based, (10) including on my own research among Mozambican
refugees in South Africa (2002-2006). (11) The analysis applies equally,
however, to locally integrated urban-based refugees, who now make up
over half of recorded refugees worldwide. (12)

Finally, my understanding of local integration applies at all
stages of the displacement process. (13) Refugee protection institutions
commonly distinguish between interim or "temporary" responses
to displacement, where the main policy options are seen to be encampment
or local integration, and "durable solutions" to displacement,
which are voluntary repatriation, local integration or third country
resettlement. The a priori distinction between "temporary" and
"durable" solutions is largely an institutional and policy
construction, since the displaced themselves rarely have a clearly
phased or linear interpretation of the temporariness or durableness of
their current life situation.

There are many refugees, especially in African host countries, who
self-settle and start integrating as soon as they cross the border,
usually without any organized intervention on their behalf. Some authors
with an intervention-focus have also suggested that local integration
should be planned for by refugee protection agencies even in the
immediate emergency phase of refugee influx, and not only as a
second-phase, medium-term option. (14) Jacobsen explicitly focuses on
protracted conflicts during which refugees integrate in the host country
while waiting for many decades to "return home." (15) Finally,
integration is a concern for those refugees whose countries of origin
have achieved some peace and stability but where the country of asylum
offers different opportunities, has become "home" in various
ways, (16) or has become enmeshed with the country of origin as a
locality for cross-border livelihoods. (17)

While local integration is potentially an option at all stages of
the refugee experience and for individual as well as large-scale refugee
movements, this is not to suggest that it is always an option, or always
the best option, or that all refugees wish to integrate in the short or
long term. However, it is an option which is often overlooked or
actively prevented by intervening institutions because of the
assumptions about refugees and refugee protection outlined below. In
order to understand in what situations refugees and hosts are likely to
succeed in integrating on their own, when targeted outsider
interventions are likely to facilitate or hinder the process, or when
other forms of intervention are needed, we need a clearer understanding
of the integration process itself.

Before developing my approach to local integration as political
negotiation, I briefly outline the assumptions about refugee protection
interventions that dominate mainstream discussions, including the
anti-warehousing debate.

Encampment and Local Integration as Policy Options

Since the 1970s, the major international actors in refugee
protection and the majority of academic commentators have seen local
integration of refugees in poor host countries as problematic. (18) In
terms of international expenditure, (19) academic attention, (20) and
media and popular perception, refugee camps have become the dominant
response to most mass displacement situations by both host states and
the international community. This is especially the case in Africa and
increasingly in Asia. (21) The Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and many states see camps as the best
interim or preparation stage where displaced people are held and helped
until the conditions are ripe for the preferred "durable
solution" of repatriation to their country of origin.

In reality, this has not always been the case. For thousands of
years, it has been the norm for people who have moved away from conflict
(just like people who moved for other reasons) to integrate locally, and
local integration was espoused as the natural and ideal solution at the
inception of the international refugee regime in the 1950s. (22)
Furthermore, a large proportion of displaced people today, whether
refugees or internally displaced, still self-settle and integrate, often
without contact with official state or international assistance
programs. Estimates of independently self-settled refugees are
notoriously unreliable, (23) but they have ranged from 30 per cent to 75
per cent of the total number of refugees in Africa. (24)

There are currently approximately 2.5 million refugees living in
camps around the world, making up one-third of the refugees counted in
the UNHCR's global statistics. In contrast to global percentages,
60 per cent of UNHCR-counted refugees in Africa are in camps. (25) This
does not include the much larger numbers of internally displaced persons
also living in camps or camp-like settlements. The dominant
characteristics of encampment are that camp residents are segregated
from the local population and that they have limited freedom of movement
or economic independence. Camps are often financed and managed by
international organizations, while some are managed by host states.

The policy and practice of refugee encampment has developed
historically in explicit opposition to the settlement of refugees among
the local population of the host country. Crisp describes the historical
and political reasons why host states in Africa increasingly rejected
local integration of refugees from the 1970s onward in favour of
encampment. These included concern about economic and environmental
burdens in poor countries (and in richer countries), security concerns,
anger at being "abandoned" by richer nations, fear of the
domestic ramifications of popular xenophobia, and the perceived need to
reassert sovereignty over porous borders. (26) Other writers note that
host governments benefit from the international aid associated with
encampment, which would not be forthcoming for self-sufficient,
integrated refugees. (27) These arguments recognize a realist
state-centric perspective and are based on the view that state rights
(sovereignty) trump individual rights, and that citizen rights trump
human rights. In this perspective, encampment is a legitimate means to
prevent perceived threats and gain desired benefits for the state and
for citizens without injuring any significant interests (since refugee
interests are not considered a priori significant).

The trend toward camps and away from local integration comes not
only from states but also reflects an institutional logic within the
international "refugee protection industry" today. (28) This
logic has seven elements which make it difficult for professional
refugee protection institutions to recognize the localized and political
nature of local integration.

First, refugee protection has become a specialized and
bureaucratized industry with international, national, and
non-governmental organizations dependent on recreating interventions for
themselves. (29) Social and political processes which cannot be clearly
traced to institutional interventions cannot be used to raise funds or
claim positive impact. Second, beyond the immediate material incomes of
specific organizations and specialists, there is a deeply held
assumption that the responsibility for, as well as the cost of, refugee
protection should lie with a centralized institution (the state or an
international organization) rather than being diffused among the
communities in which refugees might settle. Third, the idea that
refugees can bring benefits to host communities, rather than only costs,
is a common refrain in the mainstream refugee literature and in the
publicity material of refugee assistance institutions, but interventions
are rarely conceptualized around the resources and capacities which
refugees have independently. Especially encampment is based on the
assumption that all refugees are a problem and have problems; not that
only those refugees who have problems and are problematic require
assistance or intervention.

A fourth consequence of the bureaucratic focus is a tautological
definition of who is a refugee: only those people who fit into an
intervention-driven definition of refugee are counted and assisted;
therefore a perception arises that all refugees are counted and
assisted. Those refugees who self-settle and integrate are often not
counted at all in the official statistics. (30) Even in situations like
Guinea, where only 20 per cent of Sierra Leonean and Liberian refugees
are in camps, the greater visibility of camps "strongly [shapes]
the image outsiders have of all the refugees." (31)

Fifth, bureaucratization has led to a predilection for blueprint
"solutions" and standardized procedures, of which refugee
camps are particularly replicable examples. The problems associated with
importing camp models without consideration for local specificities have
been discussed elsewhere. (32) Sixth, in parallel to the programmatic
specialization and blueprints, there have developed deep discursive
specializations and blueprints. This includes the assumption that a
discourse of refugee identification and refugee rights, as defined by
international conventions, will in all cases be beneficial to the
refugees concerned and therefore is desired by them. As Andrews points
out,

Finally, the international agencies mandated with refugee
protection, as well as many academics, have accepted some of the host
states' arguments against local integration. (34) Some authors
argue convincingly that refugee protection is only possible with the
co-operation of host states, and that their priorities and concerns must
be taken into account. (35) This is clearly correct in terms of
immediate advocacy goals. However, by accepting states' fears of
permanence as associated with local integration, and therefore
supporting "temporary" encampment interventions, international
(and national) non-state actors have contributed to the construction of
the refugee as a liminal and apolitical category, a temporary aberration
in the "national order of things." (36) In addition to having
wide-ranging practical implications for the lives and livelihoods of
refugees, as well documented by authors like Smith and Harrell-Bond (37)
among others, this depoliticization and dehistoricization of refugees
has deep disciplinary and theoretical effects on our ability to
understand how refugees actively respond on arrival in a new place. (38)

These assumptions about refugees made by host states and
international refugee protection actors must be abandoned in order to
understand local integration as an empirical, contextual, historical,
and political process. Before describing this integration process in the
next section, I briefly discuss the contribution of the
"anti-warehousing" campaign, which for several years has been
advocating against encampment and for increased use of local integration
as a policy option in response to displacement. (39) I argue that while
this campaign has merits, it is misleading to present local integration
as a different but functionally equivalent policy to encampment, in that
it is something which professional refugee protection institutions do in
response to large-scale displacement of people. The
"anti-warehousing" campaign is focused on identifying the
problems with encampment, rather than understanding the process of
integration per se. The campaign therefore challenges some of the
assumptions underlying the logic of encampment and professionalized
refugee protection, but not others.

In contrast to a state-centric logic, the dominant proponents of
the anti-warehousing campaign explicitly advance the primacy of
international law (such as the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status
of Refugees and the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights) and human and
individual rights in informing their judgments. (40) The refugee rights
codified in the Refugee Convention are presented as a minimum standard
to which host states and especially international institutions such as
the UNHCR have subscribed. Measured against this standard, refugee
encampment is presented as not only illegitimate, but also
"unnecessary, wasteful, hypocritical, counterproductive, unlawful,
and morally unacceptable." (41)

As part of this argument, sovereignty and citizenship rights, as
emphasized by host states, are acknowledged, bur evidence is presented
to debunk many of the security and resource competition concerns
routinely expressed by host governments. (42) Smith, who identifies
long-term camps not only as dehumanizing in general but also as racist,
spells out the moral element very clearly. He points out that when
Europeans were designing a system of refugee protection for other
Europeans in the 1950s, camps were considered an unconscionable
throwback to dictatorial practice and local integration was the assumed
and natural route for refugees. If the architects of today's camps,
including international actors and host governments, considered refugees
as their own equals, they would not consign them to
"warehouses." (43)

Regarding the assumption that professional institutions are the
best placed to protect refugees, the anti-warehousing campaigners
document rights abuses by the UNHCR and international NGOs in detail.
They criticize the controlling approach to refugees in camps which often
stems from narrowly interpreted organizational imperatives and the
pressure on institutions to continue interventions for their own benefit
rather than a consideration of refugees as human beings with rights and
desires. (44) The conviction that refugees are a potential asset and not
a burden is central to the anti-camps argument, which they document with
extensive examples. Smith and Harrell-Bond and Verdirame also explicitly
refer to the greater psychological well-being and health of self-settled
and integrating refugees in comparison with camp-based refugees. (45)

I agree with the anti-warehousing campaigners and most commentators
on refugee issues that human rights and the rights enshrined in the
Refugee Convention are expressions of what every human being (which is
what refugees are in the first instance) should have access to in their
lives. What I am arguing is that conventional assumptions about refugee
protection limit our ability to understand how refugees actually access
and enjoy these rights and resources. There are three key assumptions,
all related, which the anti-warehousing debate does not move away from
sufficiently, and which are critical to answering the empirical question
of how refugees access rights and resources and therefore to
understanding the process of local integration.

The first assumption is that refugees are a particular group of
people, categorically different from "locals" or other kinds
of migrants, with different means of accessing rights and resources,
whose actions can be understood through a specialized knowledge. I
suggest that refugees negotiate access to rights in relation to local
power holders like any other political actor. A second, related,
assumption is that a discourse of refugee rights is always the
strategically best way of assisting refugees. I submit that often
refugees use other identities to claim rights to resources and power in
a local context, such as ethnic identification, kinship networks,
political clients or allies, etc. In some contexts, the refugee
identification does indeed facilitate access to resources, but in others
it can be counterproductive and alienating. The third assumption is that
"durable solutions" and "refugee protection" are the
result of specific interventions by specialized refugee protection
organizations based on internationally defined refugee rights. I suggest
that local integration often happens as a function of local
relationships, in the absence of specific refugee protection
interventions, and that it can be actively hindered by them. In fact,
refugee protection can be seen as a by-product of successful integration
processes, rather than integration being a result of refugee protection.
These three points will be discussed in the following sections on the
basis of African case studies.

Local Integration as Political Negotiation

My argument is that empirically, local integration is in the first
instance a social and political process of incorporating newcomers into
an existing political community. This process may or may not be
connected to a discursive and institutional framework of
"temporary" or "durable" solutions to displacement
that assumes certain things about refugees, refugee rights, the role of
the state and the role of international organizations.

The underlying questions for understanding integration as a
political process is: how do refugees (actively) get what they need to
live? This question is empirical and situational, not normative and
universal: what does enable refugees to access the things they need,
rather than who should protect them. Academics should consistently be
looking at how refugees gain access to actual power and resources
locally, as achieved through negotiation with a variety of actors, some
of whom bur certainly not all may be agents of the state, international
organizations, or NGOs. Within this framework, I agree fully with
Verdirame and Harrell-Bond's assertion that "socio-economic
integration is the best solution from the point of view of the
refugees' enjoyment of their fundamental rights" (46) because
it gives them more space to actively negotiate access to rights and
resources with whatever local power holder can actually enable those
rights at any particular time.

There are three guiding questions for a political analysis of
refugee integration:

1. Who are the local actors who control access to power and
resources and what are their interests?

2. What is the relationship of (different categories of) refugees
to those actors--what resources do refugees have which these actors can
use, or which threats do they (are they perceived to) present?

3. What tactics and strategies do refugees use within the framework
of these relationships to negotiate access to power and resources? (47)

Local Power Holders and Interests

Local actors are all actors who impact directly on the local
conditions in which refugees live. In the rural context of my own
research in South Africa, powerful actors have been village headmen and
religious leaders but also locally based officials of national state
organs, such as the Department of Home Affairs, which is responsible for
identity documentation. In this conception, local actors may also
include staff members of international organizations, if they are
present in that locality. I am counting state and international actors
as "local" in this context, since the relevant points of
interaction for refugees are the locally-based individual
representatives of such larger institutions, and the ways in which those
individuals act empirically, which may be quite different from the legal
mandates or institutional interests their structures theoretically
represent. (48) A focus on the specifics of the local is important,
since, as numerous case studies point out, the conditions for
integration are different from one district to another and from a rural
area to the adjoining town, not least because different local actors
hold power. (49)

In spite of much debate on "weak" and "failed"
states in Africa and elsewhere, the state always remains a central power
holder in refugee affairs. Particularly the question of legal
documentation, as controlled by the state, is often a crucial
constraining factor for refugee options. (50) The inclusion of a variety
of actors in the analysis is not to negate the importance of state power
to constrain or enable access to rights in many situations. However, the
particular character of state power in a particular locality, including
the specific meaning and use of documentation, cannot be taken for
granted.

Who can access documentation or who needs it is not always a
question of the law and formal state policy. As Hovil points out about
self-settled Sudanese refugees in Moyo district of Uganda, many have
avoided the entire concept of refugeedom by paying tax and carrying
"graduated poll tax tickets that act as a means of official
identification" virtually equivalent to citizenship. (51) This is
effective even though the government requires refugees to be registered
and live in camps. Bakewell writes that legal documentation was only
relevant for Angolan refugees self-settled in remote and rural Zambian
villages if they wanted to travel to towns to work, and that many
"locals" had a range of different identity documents,
including refugee cards, for different purposes. (52) In South Africa,
many Mozambicans with the requisite social or financial capital were
"adopted" by South African families of the same ethnic group
and acquired citizenship documentation through them. (53)

There are also cases where the state has little influence on border
areas where refugees self-settle, such as in Zambia in the early 1990s.
(54) In the absence of the state, other significant actors may be
traditional leaders who control access to land and have an interest in
increasing their political following; international organizations and
NGOs who offer resources and have an interest in docile clients; and
armed groups who offer or withdraw security and have an interest in
recruits.

Matching actors and their interests also illustrates that different
local actors will be most useful (or dangerous) to different groups of
refugees depending on what resources the refugees bring with them and
what strategies they are pursuing. In the Guinean case, for example,
rural Mano refugees easily integrated in rural areas, where traditional
authorities and the general population were the relevant local actors.
Urban refugees from different ethnic groups did not have the resources,
such as political clientage traditions, agricultural knowledge, and
labour power, to negotiate with these actors and did not want to, and
therefore addressed themselves to international actors and the state for
aid by establishing a "spontaneous camp" in Thuo town. (55)

Verdirame and Harrell-Bond provide a sophisticated analysis of the
roles and power relations between a plethora of actors involved in
refugee protection in Kenya and Uganda. (56) They include not only the
mandates of the various institutions, but their on-the-ground practices
and individual belief systems of staff members. What is needed in
studying other refugee contexts, including local integration, is a
similarly complex understanding of the powerful actors and their
interests and assumptions, with the understanding that the roles of
government and organized humanitarian actors may be quite marginal in
certain contexts.

Refugee Resources

In the ideal international system of refugee protection, the main
resource of refugees in relation to host states and refugee rights
organizations is their ability to claim legal and moral capital as
refugees, which is seen as sufficient to access resources and
protection. In reality, however, refugees can rarely access rights
purely on this basis, and many have to (or choose to) make use of other
resources they bring with them. These may be material resources of
exchange (financial resources, labour power and skills, trading
relationships) or various forms of legitimacy claims (kinship,
client-patron relationships, ideological affiliations). Hansen's
early work on self-settled refugees in Zambia especially shows the
relevance of cultural and social resources. (57) An analysis of
resources enables us, for example, to see cases of co-ethnic integration
not as "natural" occurrences, but rather as examples where
negotiation for rights and resources is enabled through various existing
legitimacy resources including language, cultural norms such as
reciprocity, kinship ties, and common spiritual-religious origins
(ancestors) which act along with other, more material considerations.

These resources, however, only facilitate integration if they are
deemed valuable by local counterparts or used by refugees for the
purpose of integrating. In Malkki's well-known work on Burundian
refugees in Tanzania, for example, both camp-based and "town"
refugees were of the same ethnic group, which was related to some of the
local ethnic groups. For the "town" refugees this affinity
assisted with an integration process based on remaining invisible to
authorities and locals, while for the camp refugees it was irrelevant in
their quest for a separate "mythico-historical" identification
as exiles. (58)

Other useful resources which refugees can use to facilitate
integration are labour power or their contribution to shifting
demographic patterns. An increase in population density in a previously
sparsely populated area can help locals attract state services.
Bakewell's comment on Zambia applies just as well to Mozambican
refugees in South Africa:

In camp situations, the refugees bring the same potential economic,
social, and political resources with them, but there is usually no
demand from the side of those in power, leaving refugees with fewer
bargaining tools. Kinship, language, and symbolic ties are usually
non-existent with international actors, whose own prestige is not
dependent on attracting political clients except to the extent that
there are a sufficient number of "beneficiaries" who remain
passive, needy, and controlled. Financial exchanges or individual
patron-client relationships that develop between humanitarian staff and
refugees in camps, which are so often decried as corrupt and deviant,
should in fact be understood as part of the same process by which
refugees, just like any other social group, use the resources they have
and which are in demand by those in power to negotiate desired outcomes.

Arguing that refugees claim rights as a negotiation for mutual gain
with powerful actors, rather than based on abstract principles such as
"refugee rights," is not necessarily a purely realist
argument. It is in fact a crucial, but often unstated, element of
idealist debates on accountability. Rights are only truly protected if
those claiming them have a means of sanctioning those with the power to
grant or withdraw positive freedoms and rights and the power to infringe
or protect from infringement of negative freedoms. Such sanction
presupposes a mutual, not entirely one-sided, relationship. By being
based on local political negotiation, which requires a measure of
mutuality if not necessarily equality, local integration by definition
includes more accountability in the relationship between refugees and
power-holders than camp-based situations, even as refugee rights
advocates and academics are arguing for greater accountability in
humanitarian practice. (60)

Refugee Strategies and Tactics

Of course, there is no simple or automatic supply-demand mechanism
of resources for rights; resources are deployed by refugees according to
particular strategies, depending on the desired outcomes and depending
on often significant constraints. Malkki's example is useful once
again, as the "camp refugees," in contrast to the "town
refugees," did not want to integrate locally but rather to develop
and maintain a group identification centring on return to Burundi. They
therefore targeted their claims to resources and rights at international
actors on the basis of their "refugeehood." We do not know
what would have happened if those same refugees had not had powerful
actors like the UNHCR who were responsive to this strategy. What other
actors would they have turned to for food and shelter? Would they have
had to adopt a different strategy?

Refugees also employ more subtle tactics, such as the day-to-day
construction of moral legitimacy through the invocation of shared
history by Shangaan-speaking Mozambican refugees in relation to their
Shangaan-speaking hosts in South Africa. (61) While many, even most,
Mozambican refugees remained extremely poor for twenty years after their
arrival in South Africa, the mutually reinforced identity link with
their hosts has meant that they have not experienced the often violent
xenophobia which plagues refugees and migrants in other parts of
post-1994 South Africa. (62)

Although I have been emphasizing negotiation for resources and
power as an active process, there are clearly different levels of
individual or collective agency in the choice of strategies and tactics.
Some interactions (such as bribing a UNHCR status determination official
to arrange resettlement or offering group allegiance to a chief) are
more purposeful and active than others (such as increasing the
population density of an area).

This broad model of political negotiation which looks at actors,
resources, and strategies has several benefits. It allows us to describe
and compare refugee responses across a variety of contexts and times and
with a variety of other groups of actors, such as vulnerable citizens,
internally displaced persons, and economic migrants. It is only
seemingly paradoxical that a situationally defined approach would
facilitate comparison; refugee studies has been obsessed with
classification and labelling so that camp-based refugees are studied
differently from returnees, who are again imbued with different
characteristics to internally displaced. This kind of classification
without a unifying theoretical model does not help to assess the
relative achievement of rights. I am not proposing negotiated rights as
a means of understanding local integration only; it is a means of seeing
local integration as one scenario on a continuum of relative freedom to
negotiate rights which stretches from warehoused refugees, slaves,
trafficked children, etc. on the one end, to fully enfranchised citizens
on the other. Along this continuum there may be more powerful refugees
and vulnerable ones, as well as more or less marginalized citizens.

Sometimes, marginal citizens may have fewer rights than some
refugees living among them, especially if we consider prominent
political exiles or members of rebel groups befriended with the host
state's government. Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda and Kenya
enjoy certain rights not by virtue of being refugees, but through their
association with the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) rebel
group, which is in political allegiance with the respective host
governments. SPLA membership cards allow freedom of movement in much of
Uganda, (63) while, in contrast, Acholi citizens of Uganda have been
resettled to government "villages" through a violent
constraint of movement in the past twenty years. The warehousing
critique correctly challenges the treatment of all refugees as a
homogeneous, vulnerable, and dependent group, and the approach of
analyzing the negotiation of rights gives us a means of acknowledging
the more powerful as well as the vulnerable.

This negotiating-rights perspective also allows us to compare
current negotiations for rights with historical periods when
international refugee law and human rights concepts did not exist as
benchmarks. This gives the study of refugee flows and responses a much
longer historical context and allows for more cross-fertilization with
historical studies in other disciplines. An active, political
perspective therefore brings refugees "back into history" in
more than one sense, comparatively over time and by not taking them out
of a normal process of political change and development through refugee
labelling and sequestration in camps. (64)

Local Integration through Refugee Rights?

Using the model of politically negotiated rights, "refugee
rights" become one of many possible strategies that refugees can
use to access rights within a set of structural constraints. However,
claiming "refugee rights" will only be effective as a strategy
if there are powerful actors present who are likely to react positively
to this strategy. Some host governments, international organizations and
NGOs are clearly responsive to this strategic claim. (65) But even in
cases where the organization most mandated to respond to the claim of
refugee rights--the UNHCR--is powerful, the legal rights of refugees as
set out in the Refugee Convention have often been ignored in favour of
UN-supported "warehousing." So the invocation of the refugee
identification towards institutions mandated to respond to that label
has just as often led to a direct constraint of rights as to an
expansion of rights.

As noted above, other common strategies which refugees use for
claiming access to rights include historical association, political
allegiance, and ethnic identification. In the case of Angolan refugees
in the Zambian border regions, Bakewell points out that there was an
existing historical community spanning the formal border. In the absence
of a strong central state presence in the border communities, this
historical and ethnic connection was more important than differences of
formal citizenship in accessing relevant resources such as land. (66) In
terms of political allegiance, the case of SPLA members in Uganda is
mentioned above.

The case of Mozambican refugees in South Africa serves as an
example of ethnic identification, claimed in parallel, at different
points in time, with other forms of legitimacy. Shangaan-speaking
Mozambicans escaping the civil war in the mid-1980s were welcomed and
integrated in South Africa by the Shangaan-speaking "homeland"
government (located immediately on the border with Mozambique) as ethnic
and black brothers in explicit opposition to a racist central state.
(67) Even though it did not obviate all discrimination or conflict with
locals, ethnic identification was therefore an important strategy
through which Mozambican refugees could access basic local rights (such
as access to land, low-level employment by local residents, etc.) in the
first ten years of their stay in South Africa.

After the 1994 transition to democracy in South Africa, the ethnic
"homelands" were dissolved. Faced with a central state that
still only had a fledgling refugee rights legislation or culture,
Mozambicans' strategy shifted to claiming rights from the state
(rather than only from local authorities), but by identifying themselves
as long-term residents from a neighbouring country rather than as
refugees per se. In 1995 and 1996, over 90,000 Mozambican refugees
received permanent resident status by virtue of being counted as miners
or migrants from within the Southern African Development Community
(SADC). Only in 1999, fifteen years after their arrival, did the
strategy of claiming "refugee rights" bear fruit for
Mozambicans in South Africa when a government amnesty was specifically
oriented around the right to legal regularization for Mozambican
refugees. (68)

The negotiation for documentation and rights from the state as
"migrants" and "refugees" continued to be paralleled
by a local negotiation for rights from the host community on the basis
of common ancestry and tradition, as mentioned above. (69) In fact,
trying to claim local rights on the basis of being a refugee was seen by
many Mozambicans as being counterproductive. While South African
hospitality initially included empathy with the horrors the Mozambicans
had experienced during the civil war and their extreme poverty on
arrival in South Africa, this charity soon underpinned an unequal
hierarchical relationship. To gain expanded access to resources and
rights, many Mozambicans have worked hard to renounce the need for
charity, pity, or special treatment on the basis of their refugeehood
and have made claims for local equality on the basis of long-term
residence, education level, or South African citizenship documents.

Local Integration as Refugee Protection Intervention?

People have moved to escape persecution and wars for thousands of
years and have always found ways, sometimes with ease and more often
with much difficulty, of establishing new homes among new people, or
else moving on until they did. Only rarely were those fleeing war
welcomed and integrated merely because they were displaced by war. Even
since the invention of the modern refugee regime in the 1950s, most
local integration has not been the result of a host-country or
host-community strategy based predominantly on the aim of providing
refugee protection.

The European Cold War-era refugee regime was centrally about
geopolitical and ideological rivalry, rather than about humanitarianism.
(70) In Africa, some refugees were welcomed by host states and societies
as African brothers and neighbours (not as refugees qua refugees) during
the wars of independence. (71) Some, such as the Mozambicans in South
Africa (72) or the Liberians in Cote d'Ivoire, (73) have more
recently been welcomed as co-ethnic brothers (again not as refugees per
se). Other refugees have chosen to evade the host state's official
refugee protection system and try their luck as "undocumented
migrants" or pose as locals, calculating that there was some
greater benefit in this arrangement. (74) In sum, those who were
integrated officially were not integrated on the basis of being refugees
per se, and those who are integrating unofficially feel that their lives
and chances are better by not being recognized or identified as
refugees. Neither is therefore really integration on the basis of
intentional refugee protection.

There are many case studies of local integration where the absence
of state and international interventions has been instrumental in
facilitating integration. In Sierra Leone of the early 1990s, for
example, Leach found that, "in local terms,
'self-settlement' and 'integration' were not
special, but an inevitable and well-precedented way of dealing with [the
arrival of Liberian refugees]." (75) Even in the European context,
Zetter et al. note that "in Italy, the lack of a nationally
coordinated framework of policies for settlement and control of
geographical mobility appears to have the effect of facilitating
integration and enabling local networks to consolidate and support labor
market access and social mobility." (76) When refugees decide not
to live in camps but rather to self-settle and integrate, they are often
avoiding not only the specific strictures of the camp setting, but just
as much the refugee label and concept itself and the involvement of
external institutional actors in their lives.

There are three questions implicit in the relationship between
local integration and intentional refugee protection interventions. One
is whether local integration interventions explicitly motivated by
refugee protection aims have had a good record in facilitating local
integration. We have very few empirical examples of how well locally
integrated refugees would do if they were supported by both governments
and the UNHCR without the presence of additional political or
institutional interests apart from refugee protection. As mentioned
above, in those cases where the government explicitly welcomed refugees
(such as Cote d'Ivoire in the early 1990s, (77) Tanzania of the
1960s, (78) or Malawi (79)) there was little UNHCR or NGO assistance and
governments had other strategic imperatives. We do have evidence of
cases where interventions intended for refugee protection have
constrained refugee rights and imperiled existing local integration,
including various examples of forced encampment of refugees living
independently in villages or towns. (80)

The second question is whether local integration has had a good
record in protecting refugees--i.e., whether integrated refugees enjoy
more rights and freedoms than refugees in other situations. Compared
with long-term camp sequestration, the anti-warehousing advocates have
convincingly argued that local integration is generally preferable in
terms of basic rights such as the right to free movement, the right to
work and self-sufficiency, and the right to association. (81) Others
have argued that integration is also preferable to nominally
self-sufficient settlements which nonetheless constrain free movement.
(82) Still others note that health and socio-economic indicators for
self-settled refugees are generally better than for those in camps. (83)
Even where the economic conditions are more difficult for refugees
outside camps, many choose to stay outside the camps because the freedom
to determine their own lives is deemed more important than easy access
to some services. (84)

We are left with the third, essentially normative, question
concerning the relationship between local integration and refugee
protection: what about those refugees who do not have the resources to
negotiate for successful integration and what about situations where the
local actors offer no space for refugees to negotiate or indeed attack
them? What happens/ would happen to refugees in such situations in the
absence of an international or national refugee protection intervention
such as a camp? What about those subgroups considered the most
vulnerable, and with the least independent resources for negotiation,
such as unaccompanied children, women with small children, or refugees
who are ill or disabled? What about Goma or Kosovo or Darfur, or any
other large-scale (and high-profile) mass refugee exodus, especially
where there is ongoing and widespread violence in the areas to which
people are displaced?

There are undoubtedly contexts in which particular refugees do not
and cannot survive without external assistance and without the kind of
protection provided by a spatially separate and securitized camp.
However, the existence of such particular needs and contexts does not
invalidate the point of needing to empirically study and understand
local integration where and when it happens. Furthermore, on the
normative question of which type of protection (local integration or
camp) is on average or aggregate better for particularly vulnerable
refugees in contexts of ongoing violence or very large-scale movement,
this may be impossible and indeed dangerous to answer, given the
context-specific nature of refugee needs, desires, and options.

If we do attempt a review of the available evidence comparing the
record of camps versus local integration in these extreme contexts, we
have little dear evidence, as noted above, whether encampment
interventions have a positive or negative effect in balance on refugee
welfare, including for particular subgroups of refugees. It is even more
difficult to make counterfactual suppositions; i.e., what would it have
been like if there were no camps. In order to make a counterfactual
argument, we would have to take away not only the economy of the camps
(for the international organizations and host states involved), but also
the political option of camps which host states, host communities, and
some refugee groups can now use to fall back on international actors. We
would also have to imagine away the insidious discursive construction of
helpless, dependent and burdensome refugees which comes with camps and
which affects even those refugees who are currently not in camps.

We can look at cases where large-scale refugee movements have been
absorbed by hosts without the need for camps. Guinea is, to a large
extent, such a host country, as were Malawi, Tanzania, and also many
European countries after the Second World War. We can also look at cases
where refugees, including supposedly vulnerable subgroups, have chosen
to remain outside available camps and brave the fight for survival on
their own, or at least without handouts based on "refugee
rights." Here we do have evidence that seems to show that
self-settled refugees suffer less hardship than camp-based ones, or are
willing to suffer greater economic hardship for the added freedoms of
self-settlement. We should also be doing more comparative work with
historical migrations, to see how refugees survived, or not, before the
invention of an international system of refugee rights.

Conclusion

To pre-empt a range of criticisms which a focus on refugee agency
and the social and political "normality" of the integration
process may potentially and to some extent legitimately provoke, let me
outline four dangers of this approach. First, it may seem to underplay
the structural constraints which refugees face, most significantly the
role of the state in deciding on who has rights within its borders.
Second, it may seem to gloss over the hardship that many refugees
certainly experience. Third, it could be misunderstood as a fatalistic
perspective, which holds that if integration happens
"naturally" it is inevitable, and if it does not happen
"naturally" there is nothing which concerned institutions can
do about it, even if vulnerable people are suffering. Finally, it may
seem to underestimate the power and importance of the legal framework as
a potentially progressive and protective or constraining and
discriminatory force. It is certainly not my intention to suggest these
things.

In relation to the first two points, I am simply arguing that we
need to look at both structural constraints and hardship situationally
in each case of local integration (or where local integration is not
happening), and how refugees empirically react to and manage them. In
looking at how refugees negotiate protection, rights, and access to
resources, we should not overlook informal non-state actors (such as
community leaders, individual local residents, etc.) and their roles in
protecting and enabling access to rights and the management of hardship
in the local context. There is no suggestion that constraints and
hardships do not exist where local integration takes place, or that they
are a priori any greater or lesser than in encampment contexts.

In relation to the following two points--fatalism and law--we
should be aware that both the dominant power structures and the laws
which form the basis of the ideal refugee protection framework which is
often held up as a model are, in fact, quite recent inventions, that
they are not universally experienced, and that they have changed
significantly in the past fifty, twenty and even five years. They will
change again. Therefore, in understanding what actually happens on the
ground, we should not start from a prescriptive idea of what should be,
how states should act, and how the law should function, but rather start
from a descriptive analysis of how states and communities act and how
the law functions.

Finally, any comparison of local integration and encampment as ways
of living needs to be clear on what benchmark is being applied. The
"enjoyment of rights" by refugees is often touted as a
measure, assessed through welfare indicators such as access to food,
health, education, employment, etc. But this may be missing much of the
point of how refugees experience local integration. The freedom to act
politically and strategically, i.e., the "freedom to pursue normal
lives," (85) may be the more important criterion from their
perspective. The defining characteristic of encampment is the constraint
of this freedom.

Hovil expresses the significance of freedom well in her study of
Sudanese refugees in Moyo District, Uganda:

The actual physical constraint of the camp is matched by a much
more subtle constraint, which I am arguing against. This is the
assumption that it is up to "us," as professionals and
institutions mandated with refugee protection, to "give"
refugees freedom to negotiate access to their own rights. Justice Albie
Sachs, in the introduction to Verdirame and Harrell-Bond's new
book, shows how deeply this perception sits when he says: "there is
a need for giving refugees a far more active role in deciding on their
future." (87)

I have made an argument primarily about how we think about refugee
responses and responses to refugees, not about what specific policy
should be followed in response to displacement or to facilitate
integration. Anti-warehousing advocacy campaigners are doing valuable
work presenting arguments for a change in policy around encampment,
within the context of the institutional arrangements (and the
concomitant interests) that we have today. This debate against camps is
appropriately based on a combination of arguments about human rights
(contributing to showing up the hypocrisy and double standards of an aid
system supposedly based on this concept), basic welfare, and
cost-benefit analysis, thereby showing that camps do not provide a good
service to refugees and only an illusory and morally indefensible
service to states and international agencies. This campaign is a step in
the right direction.

When the follow-on policy question arises, "Well, if not
camps, what else shall we do with them then?" one can make many
arguments about human rights, basic welfare, and cost-benefit analysis
in favour of local integration, and can define government and
international aid interventions which are likely to facilitate or
constrain it. These are mainly to do with documentation, access to
labour markets, and access to/ investment in basic services for all
residents of a particular area, as has already been well-argued in
documents such as the UNHCR Standing Committee's "Framework
for Durable Solutions for Refugees and Persons of Concern," (88)
and various academic papers. (89) It is definitely desirable to raise
the profile of local integration with refugee rights and advocacy
organizations who are arguing within the current, dominant "durable
solutions" paradigm.

But I am also suggesting that academics must take the additional
step of looking beyond the current institutional arrangements and their
demands for particular policy justifications. (90) Empirical research
which does not start from an explicit policy perspective is not merely a
luxury. Bakewell has argued that "research which is designed
without regard to policy relevance may offer a more powerful critique
and ironically help to bring about more profound changes than many
studies that focus on policy issues from the outset." (91) This is
partly because institutions, especially ones specialized in crisis
management, tend to have short historical memories and therefore tend to
assume that things are as they are because they cannot be otherwise (or
at least that only minor policy tweaks here or there are possible). (92)
More importantly, by circling around a policy objective, the expert
refugee industry is largely talking to itself and telling itself what it
should do rather than considering all the actors and options available
in real life. This is not in itself wrong, as institutions should be
taking responsibility for monitoring their own interventions and holding
themselves accountable as much as possible.

However, the problem remains that policy talk is inevitably and by
definition skewed toward a consideration of existing institutional
responses and logics. It is a simple fact that the majority of people we
may call refugees does not actually experience the institutional
interventions and logics as institutions assume they do. A significant
proportion of refugees is not in camps and has never been
"captured" in statistics or target-group specifications. For
them, creatively negotiating power relations with local power holders is
not a policy option; it is simply what they do. Even of those who are
"captured" in the system, only a minority internalize it to
the extent that they conform to the models institutions provide--either
in camps or during repatriation drives or in local communities. By
taking these models as the exclusive (explicit or implicit) benchmarks
for refugee actions, we, as academics, run the risk of
"warehousing" refugees not only with barbed wire and tents but
also with words.

(11.) My research was conducted as part of the Refugee Research
Project, now part of the Forced Migration Studies Programme (FMSP) of
the University of the Witwatersrand. From 2002-2006 I was resident in
Bushbuckridge District, South Africa, bordering Mozambique, where
approximately 30 per cent of the population in the east of the district
are refugees from the Mozambican civil war. My methodologies included
repeated structured and unstructured interviews with members of
fifty-seven households in three villages, half of South African and half
of Mozambican origin, as well as key informant interviews and
participation in public village events.

(18.) Crisp, "Local Integration"; NGO Statement on Local
Integration Global Consultations on International Protection 22-24 May
2002, http://www.icva.ch/ doc00000865.html. The UNHCR 1995 report The
State of the World's Refugees: In Search of Solutions ignored local
integration almost entirely.

(25.) UNHCR, "2009 Global Trends" 1, 15. The estimates of
up to 75 per cent of African refugees being self-settled assume that
most of these refugees are not included in UNHCR statistics.

(26.) Crisp, "Local Integration," 5.

(27.) Jacobsen; Smith, "Warehousing Refugees."

(28.) Clearly, there are many different actors concerned with
refugee protection and refugee rights, and there are significant
variations in approach, influence, and impact. I do not wish to suggest
that all intervening organizations or all host states share all of the
assumptions listed in these two paragraphs. Nonetheless, I believe there
is a core logic that informs most of the large-scale, high-visibility
refugee protection institutions and interventions, such as the UNHCR and
large NGOs involved in refugee camps, and that this core also structures
what other, smaller actors do and think.

(36.) Lusa Malkki, "Refugees and Exile: From 'Refugee
Studies' To the Natural Order of Things," Annual Review of
Anthropology 24 (1995).

(37.) Smith, "Warehousing Refugees"; Harrell-Bond,
Imposing Aid.

(38.) Malkki, "Refugees and Exile"; Malkki,
"Speechless Emissaries"

(39.) See the anti-warehousing campaign website, http://www
.refugees.org/warehousing. See, most recently (late 2008), the
initiative to entrench self-reliance as a standard of refugee care:
http://www.refugees.org/conclusion. The extensive campaign to date has
the support of over one hundred NGOs from around the world,
predominantly from the South, as well as significant support from within
the UN system. See Merrill Smith, ".Warehousing Refugees";
Jacobsen, "The Forgotten Solution"; Jeff Crisp, "No
Solutions in Sight: The Problem of Protracted Refugee Situations in
Africa" Working Paper No. 75, New Issues in Refugee Research
(2003).

(46.) Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, "Rights in Exile: Violations
of Refugee Rights in Camps"12.

(47.) Certeau defines "tactics" as "small
manoeuvres" that subvert and play with dominant meanings.
"Strategies" refer to more calculated everyday efforts to
advance one's position from within a given set of structural
constraints; Certeau 1984: 37, cited in Graeme Rodgers, "When
Refugees Don't Go Home: Post-War Mozambican Settlement across the
Border with South Africa" (PhD dissertation, University of the
Witwatersrand, 2002), 4.

(50.) Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, "Rights in Exile: Violations
of Refugee Rights in Camps," 12; Crisp, "The Local Integration
and Local Settlement of Refugees: A Conceptual and Historical
Analysis"; Jacobsen, "The Forgotten Solution: Local
Integration for Refugees in Developing Countries."

(51.) Hovil, "Free to Stay, Free to Go?," 6

(52.) Bakewell, "Returning Refugees or Migrating
Villagers?" 12.

(53.) Chris Dolan, "The Changing Status of Mozambicans in
South Africa and the Impact of This on Repatriation to and
Re-Integration in Mozambique" (Maputo: Norwegian Refugee Council,
1997); Tara Polzer, "Akdapting to Changing Legal Frameworks:
Mozambican Refugees in South Africa--an Historical Overview,"
International Journal of Refugee Law 19, no. 1 (2007).

(62.) Tara Polzer, "Lessons from a Border Area: Why There Is
Relatively Little Xenophobia against Mozambicans in Bushbuckridge,
Mpumalanga," In Submission to Open Hearing on Xenophobia and
Problems Relating to It, Hosted by the South African Human Rights
Commission with the Portfolio Committees of the Departments of Foreign
Affairs and Home Affairs, Johannesburg, 1-3 November 2004 (Johannesburg:
Acornhoek Advice Centre, Wits University, 2004).

(63.) Hovil, "Free to Stay, Free to Go?," footnote 69.

(64.) Malkki, "Refugees and Exile."

(65.) By using the term "strategic" I do not intend to
question that many refugees who use this strategy are genuine refugees
tender the Convention definitions. I am merely pointing out that genuine
refugees can also choose to use other bases for claiming rights.

(66.) Bakewell, "Repatriation and Self-Settled Refugees in
Zambia."

(67.) E. Ritchken, "Leadership and Conflict in Bushbuckridge:
Struggles to Define Moral Economies within the Context of Rapidly
Transforming Political Economies" (PhD dissertation, University of
the Witwatersrand, 1995).

(68.) Polzer, "Adapting to Changing Legal Frameworks."

(69.) Rodgers, "When Refugees Dofft Go Home."

(70.) Laura Barnett, "Global Governance and the Evolution of
the International Refugee Regime" International Journal of Refugee
Law 14, no. 2/3 (2002): 238-62.

(74.) See Malkki, Purity and Exile; Hovil, "Free to Stay, Free
to Go?"; Harrell-Bond and Verdirame, Rights in Exile: Janus-Faced
Humanitarianism for some studies of refugees who have consciously
avoided camp settlement.

Tara Polzer is a senior researcher with the Forced Migration
Studies Programme, University of the Witwatersrand
(tara.polzer@wits.ac.za). She is also affiliated with the Development
Studies Institute (DESTIN) at the London School of Economics and
Political Science.

An early version of this paper was presented at the 9th Conference
of the International Association of the Study of Forced Migration, Sao
Paulo, Brazil, 9-12 January 2005. The author would like to thank the
Wits Humanities Graduate Centre Publications Project for its support and
Susan van Zyl as well as two anonymous reviewers for their comments.

UNHCR and humanitarian agencies commonly use the category of
"refugee" in order to determine the population eligible for aid or
resettlement. However, for understanding ... how the displaced
themselves negotiate their survival with their hosts, this
demographic category obscures more than it reveals. (33)

The arrival of the refugees was regarded positively by Zambian
villagers as not only did they cultivate the bush, but they also
boosted the population to levels better able to draw in services
such as schools and clinics. For the chiefs and headmen, the
increased population also increased their prestige. (59)

The most striking contrast between those refugees living in
settlements and those who are self-settled is not the difference in
relative standards of living, but the response they have to their
predicament. The feeling of powerlessness pervading the interviews
with settlement refugees stands in direct contrast to those who had
opted out of the refugee assistance structures and were taking
responsibility for their lives. There is obviously a danger of
over-romanticising the lives of self-settled refugees. By no means
are their circumstances easy--not least of all because they are not
recognized by the refugee assistance structures in operation.
However, the fact remains that their ability to move freely has a
positive impact on their lives, allowing them to utilize fully the
resources around them and make choices based on where they exist.
(86)